Love in the Phoney War - March-April 1940

Yesterday's entry found my father's crush on Käte running into the double problem of her impending marriage, and his own lack of funding for another term's study at Woodbrooke, which meant that he would have to leave at Easter and decide what to do with his life.

( Shall we find out how it ended? )

This is where the diary ends, alas - just too soon for the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. When I discovered a 1940 diary I was hopeful it would contain observations on all these things, but given my father's seeming lack of interest in anything military I'm not convinced he'd have mentioned them anyway. In fact, I know very little of how he spent the rest of this year. The only anecdote I remember him mentioning is of firewatching. During one of the worst nights of the Blitz he was sitting on a tall building somewhere in central London, with the city in flames around him. Suddenly, out of the air a piece of half burned paper floated, landing at his feet. Only the following words were legible:

Delivered with all possible dispatch.

Harrods.